I have a PHP site that has many dynamically generated pages. I'm trying to turn to mod_cache to help boost performance, because in most cases, content does not change in a given day.

I have configured mod_cache as best I could, following examples around the web, including the mod_cache page on apache.org. When I set LogLevel debug, I see a bit of information about the caching that is [not] happening. There are plenty of pairs of lines like this:

[Fri Jun 01 17:28:18 2012] [debug] mod_cache.c(141): Adding CACHE_SAVE filter for /foo/bar
[Fri Jun 01 17:28:18 2012] [debug] mod_cache.c(148): Adding CACHE_REMOVE_URL filter for /foo/bar

Which is fine, because I've set CacheEnable disk /foo, to indicate that I want everything under /foo cached. I'm new to mod_cache, but my understanding about these lines is that it just means that mod_cache has acknowledged that the URL is supposed to be cached, but there are supposed to be more lines indicating that it is saving the data to cache, and then later retrieving them on subsequent hits to the same URL.

I can hit the same URL till I'm blue in the face, whether with F5 refreshing, or not, or with different browsers, or different computers. It's always that pair of lines that shows in the logs, and nothing else.

When I set CacheEnable disk /, then I see more activity. But I don't want to cache the entire site, and there are many, many different subpaths to the site, so I don't want to have to modify code to set no-cache headers in all the necessary places.

I'll mention that mod_rewrite is in use here, rewriting /foo/bar to something like index.php?baz=/foo/bar, but my understanding is that mod_cache uses the pre-rewrite URL, not the post-rewrite URL.

As far as I can tell, I have the response headers not getting in the way of caching. Here's an example from one hit:

Cache-Control:must-revalidate, max-age=3600
Connection:Keep-Alive
Content-Encoding:gzip
Content-Length:16790
Content-Type:text/html
Date:Fri, 01 Jun 2012 21:43:09 GMT
Expires:Fri,  1 Jun 2012 18:43:09 -0400
Keep-Alive:timeout=15, max=100
Pragma:
Server:Apache
Vary:Accept-Encoding

mod_cache config is as follows:

CacheRoot   /var/cache/apache2/
CacheDirLevels 3
CacheDirLength 2
CacheEnable disk /foo

What is getting in the way of mod_cache doing its job of caching?